commentary
First it was the Affero General Public License that Google banned from its Google Code site, an open-source code hosting site. Google contended that it didn’t want to encourage license proliferation by accepting projects using licenses that don’t have widespread use and acceptance.
This week, however, Google nixed a highly popular, important license license: Mozilla Public [...]

I’m no tablet expert, but the reviews on Amazon and this one on About.com peg this as a pretty solid model (the ratings average 4 out of 5 stars). It features 1,024 pressure-sensitivity levels, a wireless pen, a wireless mouse, and a copy of the aforementioned Corel Painter. Although the specs indicate Windows compatibility only, [...]

A Hong Kong company says it’s come up with a biodegradable USB drive. It’s made out of fermented corn material, something called polylactide, which will actually break down in a way that doesn’t harm whatever landfill it ends up in.

That’s what happens when you go to any press conference or industry conference these days. Vendors [...]

The folks at StreamMyGame have the same idea and have a wonderful solution that lets you stream your games over the Web. Tuesday morning the company announced support for a breadth of UMPCs like the ASUS EeePC and HP Mini-Note, the kind of computers designed with minimal computing in mind.
The app works by [...]

It’s called Squirrelfish Extreme, and the WebKit programmers said Thursday in a blog posting that it’s more than twice as fast as the first-generation Squirrelfish announced in June and more than three times faster than the current WebKit 3.1 version. They based their conclusions on one benchmark, SunSpider.

“SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast [...]

Update 5:25 p.m. PDT: Google fixed the problem, according to an update notice Google pointed out to me.

“At around 1:40 p.m. we were able to isolate the issue, and requests are currently serving normally,” the update said. “This outage was the result of a bug in our datastore servers and was triggered by a particular [...]

Read David’s review.
(Credit: Kodak)
Many of the things he points out are indeed not very bright ways to handle things. But I can sympathize with a manufacturer executive Pogue quotes: “Consumer electronics is a very difficult business. It’s difficult to get it right.” Apple, Google, Sonos, R.I.M and (used to be) Palm only make it [...]

You’ll find some of these same search parameters when you click “Show search options” to the right of the Gmail search box, but operators are faster, plus they give you more flexibility. For example, you can use the date range drop-down menu in the Search options box, or just enter after:2008/04/04 before:2008/04/07 to search mail [...]

CNET reviews LG's entry-level 50-inch 1080p plasma, the 50PG30.

In person, however, the 50PG30 was a bit less impressive. Our main gripe has to do with color accuracy; despite a plethora of adjustments, including a full color management system that allows tweaking of primary and secondary colors, we couldn’t get color to look quite right. Just-average [...]

(Credit:
Apple, Dan Farber)
Rubicon Consulting’s survey of 460
iPhone users in the U.S. surfaced the obvious. iPhone users are are young (half under 30), tech savvy and, besides telephony, primarily use the device for e-mail, texting, and Web browsing.
Apple’s brilliant “Think Different” ad campaign, which ran from around 1997 to 2002 around the Macintosh, was about [...]